Ivan the Terrible

Ivan IV Vasilievich (Russian: Иван IV Васильевич) better known as Ivan the Terrible ( Kolomenskoye , August 25 , 1530 – Moscow , March 18 , 1584 ) was the Grand Prince of Moscow between the years 1533 and 1547, later crowned Tsar of Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584 . Ivan IV was the first of the Russian great princes to officially call himself “Tsar of All Russia.”

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Biographical summary
  • 1 The Great Prince
  • 2 Domestic policy: constitution of a State
  • 3 Foreign policy: expansion through Tatar territory and failure in the Livonian War
• 2 Death
• 3 Sources

Biographical summary

Son of Basil III and Elena Glinski and grandson of Ivan III , upon marrying Sofia Paleologus, niece of the last emperor of Byzantium, he assumed the imperial tradition and transmitted the title of Tsar to his son .

The Great Prince

When his father died in 1533 , when he was three years old, he was crowned and his mother ruled as regent, who five years later was murdered as a result of intrigues between the boyar families who were vying for power. During the years preceding his personal rule he was used politically by both the Glinskis , the family to which his mother belonged, and by the Bielskis and the Shuiskis .

Son and grandson of Muscovite rulers (including Daniel , son of Alexander Nevsky ), he was three years old when his father Basil III died (1533). His mother Elena Glinsky , of Lithuanian descent, assumed the regency for five years, while he was educated by Metropolitan Macarius , who had some influence over his tutelage until his death in 1563. From then on Ivan held the title of great prince, since He had been crowned by Metropolitan Daniel in the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow.

At the age of 12, Ivan began torturing animals for fun: he threw cats and dogs into the void from the battlements of the Kremlin to watch them crash to the ground.

His first known political crime occurred in 1543 (at age 14) when he ordered Andrei Chuiski , head of Russia’s most influential boyar clan, to be thrown to the hungry dogs. He created the Oprichina , the political police, which produced tens of thousands of arbitrary executions. Victims were impaled, drowned, strangled, whipped to death, burned alive or even roasted.

After the regent died in 1538, the boyarins (‘boyars’, families of noble landowners), divided into various factions, took power and tried to use young Ivan; The most powerful was that of some of the prince’s relatives, the Glinskys . Ivan, although from his earliest childhood he attended government events, was barely able to dedicate himself to anything other than hunting or getting to know his kingdom – although he already had some incipient assertions of authority, such as having the tongue of an aristocrat who criticized him cut out, or execute others― until he was able to prevail in 1547.

He then titled himself “tsar” on January 16 – as he claimed to be descended from the Roman Emperor Augustus , and he married a month later Anastasia Zakarina-Yureva , who acted on her husband with the same appeasing role as Macarius -; They both had six children, of whom only two survived. His reign was aimed at strengthening and enlarging the nascent Russian power, internally and externally. To this end he organized a central and authoritarian state, suppressed the southern Turko-Mongol khanates , and tried to enter Europe through the Baltic ( Livonian War between 1558 and 1582), but failed and then had to turn eastward ) .

Calculating despite his outbursts of anger, he used his numerous marriages – six – to establish political ties. Promoter of culture (especially printing), he himself wrote on political and religious matters: he defended the divine granting to the ruler of absolute power. All this gives a rough idea of ​​his close relationship with the Orthodox Church , which he, at times, used for his political purposes.

Domestic policy: constitution of a State

For the creation of a strong Russian State, he reformed the civil code ( Sudebnik , 1550) and promoted the creation of a strictly Russian religious code ( Stoglav ), which allowed him to affirm the autonomy of the Russian church with respect to the patriarch of Constantinople and obtain in return your favor). He eliminated or deported the boyars – not without resistance from them (revolt of 1564) – and replaced them with the small nobility or a new service one.

Although he used some privy advisors, such as Prince Andrei Kurbski – who defected and went to the service of the King of Poland -, Aleksei Adasev , the priest Sylvester or Boris Godunov , especially relied on his own guard, the Streltsi , and then the Opritchniks (a police force of between one thousand and six thousand men), to whom he granted the lands confiscated from the boyars, and soon became a powerful elite, until in 1572 they were dissolved for not having known how to defend Moscow from a Tatar attack. He also claimed popular support, because in 1566, for the first time, he convened a national assembly ( Zemski Sobor ), as well as reformed the army and military service.

It also created two large administrative regions: Opritchina ; of personal Government, and Zemchtchina , of joint Government with the aristocracy. He reextended common serfdom, and violently cut off all opposition to his authority, even if it came from the ecclesiastical side: for example, he made the ambitious Prince Vladimir of Staritsky and his mother disappear (around 1569), and in 1570 he decimated the population of Novgorod. . His victims during his reign were more than three thousand (the figures correspond to the lists of names that the tsar sent to the monasteries so that they could pray for his souls).

Finally, it enhanced trade by allowing the activity of English and Swedish merchants (who founded various factories in Russia) and by sending Russians to England and the Netherlands ; In 1584 he founded the port of Arkangelsk on the White Sea .

Foreign policy: expansion through Tatar territory and failure in the Livonian War

Abroad, it put an end to the centuries-old Turko-Mongol presence in Russia, whose former hegemony had long since been lost: the small khanates on the banks of the Volga , Kazan and Astrakhan , were incorporated in 1552 and 1554. Despite this, Moscow still it would be sacked by the Crimean Tatars in 1571. The desire to obtain an outlet to the Baltic Sea and thus achieve better trade routes was frustrated by the strength of the Polish-Lithuanians and Swedes: in 1558 Ivan IV took Narva (in the duchy of Livonia ) and then Latvia , but the Livonians requested help from their lord Sigismund II Augustus of Poland , who, reconciled with the Swedes, finally defeated him in 1576 and 1578 (Battle of Venden ).

He had to renounce the acquired territories and withdraw, as established in the treaties of Jam Zapolski (1582) and Narva (1583) – the signing of which was assisted by the mediation of Antonio Possevino , envoy of Pope Gregory XIII -. In the course of the war he had tried to get closer to Poland , and even to unite Russia with that country through a marriage proposal made to Sigismund’s sister, Caterina ; The fact that his proposals were rejected did not prevent her from presenting his candidacy for the Polish throne after the Jagiellonian dynasty became extinct in 1572.

The frustrated push in the West was redirected to the East: around that time it incorporated the Siberian Khanate , which moved the Russian border to the Irtish River , beyond the Ural Mountains . This was the beginning of the advance that took his successors to the other end of Asia , to the shores of the Pacific Ocean . He entrusted the colonization of the great Siberian expanses to the Stroganovs , who used the Cossacks (former Russian and Ukrainian peasants established on the borders). Precisely one of his leaders, the ataman Yermak , had been the protagonist of the conquest of Western Siberia , commanding a few hundred men.

The Terrible was succeeded in 1584 by an incapable son, Fedor I Ivanovich – since he himself had murdered his first-born in a fit of rage (1580) -, which began three decades of instability in Russia, which would last until the advent of the Romanov dynasty (1613), a family to which Ivan IV’s first wife, Anastasia , had belonged .

Death

Ivan IV died in Moscow (Russia) in 1584.

Sources

• “Ivan IV of Russia” , article published on the MCN Biographies website.
• “Iván IV of Russia” , article published on the Biographies and Lives website. Accessed January 15, 2011.
• “The cruelty of Ivan the Terrible” , July 2010 article published on the Exekieli website. Accessed January 15, 2011.